7 New Books You Need to Read this Summer

Forget the seasonal promise of the so-called “beach read.” We’ve hand-selected the most standout works of fiction being published this summer. These seven titles are so heartbreaking, hilarious, and thought-provoking, the world is sure to continue reading them well beyond Labor Day.

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1'Rich People Problems' by Kevin Kwan

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The third installment of Kwan’s side-splittingly satirical, insatiably voyeuristic Crazy Rich Asians series revives the larger-than-life world of a wealthy Chinese family. This time, the clan’s various members gather at the bedside of a dying matriarch, seemingly to pay their respects but really hoping to take home a piece of the billion-dollar pie. Familial infighting and hilarious dramatics ensue once again, promising yet another page-turning romp through the rarefied world of Asia’s upper crust.

The 2008 financial crisis and the toll it took on individual families anchors this debut novel, which follows the teenage daughter of a disgraced bank executive and the four women drawn into her search for the truth of his betrayal.

She’s made her name as a revered memoirist, most recently with 2015’s Leaving Before the Rains Come. But this June marks Fuller’s stunning breakthrough into fiction with a novel set on a Native American reserve in South Dakota. Fuller’s narrative of the rifts that divide us from even the closest of kin—and the impossibility of ever fully escaping our roots—will ring hauntingly true for us all.

A newly-single, professionally frustrated thirty-something witnesses her father, a once-idolized professor of history, gradually and ironically lose his ability to remember the past in this light-as-air yet powerful debut. At turns both tenderly poignant and blisteringly funny, it's a story of a young adult who travels back to her roots hoping to take solace in their constancy—only to find that home is about to deal her her greatest obstacle yet.

The 20th-century surrealist art world meets 21st-century digital and popular culture in Rose’s mesmerizing debut thriller. It opens with 17-year-old Lee at home in the placid Philadelphia suburbs. She quickly finds herself on a fast-paced adventure, starting with juvenile detention and moving to homeless desperation and an illicit underground society with a mission that could threaten the underpinnings of human society. It’s as cleverly written as it is illuminating and deeply referential, and once you start we dare you to try to put it down.

The third novel by an author who’s been weaving indelible portraits of race and class in America for nearly two decades could not have arrived at a more apt time, as we find ourselves in the aftermath of a real-world presidential election immersed in identity politics. In New People, a young biracial couple grapples with their role in a 21st-century New York environment that purports to embrace differences but perhaps doesn’t always, a situation which threatens to unravel their love altogether. The stakes of Senna’s latest triumph are both personal and global and will provide a powerful and necessary echo of our current cultural climate.

The tale of Turtle, a teenage girl being raised by her unstable widower father in the Northern California wilderness, will draw you so intimately into the heart and mind of this troubled captive that you’ll almost feel her anguish—emotional and physical—as your own through the page. Tallent’s breathtaking debut is a harrowing and at times psychologically difficult journey on the scale of A Little Life or The Goldfinch, but it’s worth it. The unflagging tenacity of this young heroine as she navigates her path to adulthood against seemingly insurmountable odds is a true inspiration.

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